Drunken Stepfather points us to a new site from Bacardi called BacardiLive.
In a video, the characters "Bacardi" and "Cola," introduce "Diet Coke," a little guy who pumps up the benefits of Diet Coke to two sultry ladies at a party. The skit is just a small part of the site which let's you step inside the world of Bacardi with music pumped in while games, sweepstakes, Bacardi-gras, gorgeous Bacardi gallery girls and a bit of Fat Joe are enjoyed. Recently, Bacardi also launched PlanetParty - a virtual nightclub and human party behavior information site for aliens.
The site is engaging enough to warrant some time spent fooling around which, in the long run, is all good. As you radio buyers know, high TSL is a very good thing.
While stage moms don't need any more ammunition to make them even more overbearing and freakishly obsessive about their children, Fairchild Publications is going to make that possible with the launch of its new Cookie magazine. Cookie, billed as "The Magazine for Sophisticated Parents," is a style and shopping magazine filled with all sorts of fashionable items no kid actually needs but will help parents play Barbie using their kids.
The magazine hopes to offer parents information to dress their children in classic style, help them eat exotic foods and surround them with great design. Well, at least it might keep the kids out of McDonald's.
Bunny McIntosh of Melting Dolls has the solution for preventing teen sex and all the dangers that come with it. She's created an ad telling teens to turn to cyber sex rather than flesh and bone to release their sexual urges. Since AOL brought chat to the masses, unleashing the over-sexed freaks of the world upon unsuspecting teens, cyber sex has become a mainstay. Until now, it's been a scary prospect for parents. Now, it has a purpose. Perhaps now, parents will even encourage their teen children to experience a little extra bliss locked in their rooms behind their computer screen, one hand on the keyboard, the other somewhere else.
Promoting safe and healthy masturbatorial pleasure, the ad mirrors the preachy, anti-drug campaign tone with a visual of a smiling teen who says, in body copy, "I'm choosing cyber sex. Cyber sex is a safe alternative to intercourse. No STD's, no babies, no pressure. Just a 40 year old man in is grandma's basement who likes to tell me I'm pretty."
Sure it's a joke but it's also true. A little regular masturbation never hurt anybody. Full sized ad is here.
As a result of the "clueless Dad" backlash, we predict the next trend in advertising to be the "smart Dad" whose stunning wit and intelligence will out maneuver even the smartest, hippest, home/career juggling Mom. Currently, Verizon holds the "clueless Dad" award but the trend is years old and ripe for change. We eagerly await the advertiser who can make Dad look smart, Mom look "un-smart" and do it without returning women to their place next to the Refrigerator as they were often shown.
While we're sure we won't be seeing a spot called, "Get Me A Beer, Bitch" from Budweiser, perhaps we'll see a new form of advertising emerge which goes for something other than the lowest common denominator and portrays people as real human beings with intelligence rather than the buffoons they, more often than not, appear to be in many ads. Making someone look dumb is the simplest way to get a laugh and the fastest way to make the viewer feel superior to the poor loser in the ad. Verizon and others who employ the "clueless Dad" and the general "people are idiots" creative strategy should be ashamed of themselves. Of course, tomorrow, we'll probably have a story poking fun at some cause group who can't see the humor in Hardee's surely-to-be-seen-soon busty babe on a pogo stick forcing men to drop to their knees and drool ad for their new five pound Mondo Chicken Breast Burger.
In a nod to the ever dwindling ability of people to pay attention to anything longer than the time it takes a teenage boy to...oh, we've used that one before, Cadillac, on January 15, will launch a series of five second commercials to illustrate the speed of its cars which can accelerate from zero to 60 in that short time. The ads include a voiceover which says, "How fast? That Fast."
Cadillac Marketing Director Jay Spenchian explains saying, "The whole idea is to attract the attention of those who hadn't considered Cadillac until this point. This is a dramatic way of getting their attention." As usual, Joan Claybrook, president of joy-killing Public Citizen has complained the ads glorify speed and are off target saying, "Middle-aged people don't need it, and younger people can't afford these cars." Well, at least she's not being politically correct.
A reader wonders whether NetZero's choice of Dennis Miller as its new spokesperson is a good move writing, "Every once in a while I am abused by Dennis Miller, who implies I am an idiot for not signing up for NetZero; yet Miller is broadly known for his stupidity relative to football and is currently becoming broadly known for his stupidity relative to world politics; so I am wondering if he might not also be stupid about the Internet." Has the idiocy of this irony gone too far? We though Dennis Miller had retired years ago.
In what is believed to be a first of its kind, Starbucks, in cooperation with Clear Channel Taxi Media, launched a taxi-top campaign in Boston a few weeks ago that has pedestrians bugging taxi drivers. For the campaign, a Venti cup of Starbucks coffee was fitted with a magnet and attached to the top of 100 Boston cabs.
The campaign received terrific attention though it's not clear how much it contributed to the brand. Like watching their husbands cluelessly drive off with the baby left atop the minivan's roof, passersby on both foot and in cars pointed, yelled and beeped at the unlucky cab drivers thinking the poor sole had left his coffee on the roof.
Announced long ago, TiVo has finally released TiVoToGo, its feature that allows TiVo users to burn shows to their computers.
Advertisers can only hope and pray ads are downloaded too.
No matter how hard Buick tries, it just can't get it's audience up for its brand. Always to be known as the car hat-wearing grandfathers drive, the brand, with the help of McCann Erickson, Detroit is trying to erect limp sales by having a hot chick dance seductively, complete with headlight to "headlight" camera pan, around the "always chic, always flattering, all new" LaCrosse. While the spot hopes to align the imagery of the vehicle with the imagery a woman imagines of herself when looking in the mirror, it's likely to leave guys in a state of semi-get-the-car-get-the-girl-delusion wondering what a hot chic is doing in a Buick.
Anyway, in this week's Ad Age TV Spots of the Week, Joan Rivers wants to make sure she waxes her butt in a spot with daughter Melissa for their new TV Guide show; a turtle carries a can of Diet Coke on its back because it, somehow, it helps him love life; a bunch of guys demonstrate sports watching idiocy for Pepsi Wild Cherry; and PalmOne gives us a very basic but very informative spot for its Treo. New year. Same stuff. OK, so all these spots were created last year. We'll be patient.
In a wrap up of prognostications for 2005, MediaPost collected quotes from advertising's big names including ANA President Bob Liodice, StarcomIP President Rishad Tobaccowala and Carat USA VP Director of Programming Shari Brill.
Tobaccowala brings the soon to be insane levels of customized, segmented, spliced, diced niche targeting back to reality saying, “Re-aggregation rather than segmentation becomes the rage as clients realize that it is less and less about chiseling down large masses of audience but rather re-combining clusters of people into some form of scale." In essence, an aggregation of customized consumer demographic, psychographic, contextual, behavioral, astrological, medical, ideological, political, legal, sexual profiles into mass marketing's version of one to one marketing.
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